Banner: A protester holds a mobile phone with a Palestinian flag and a photo of the spokesperson for the armed wing of Hamas, Abu Ubaida, during a rally held by pro-Houthi protesters, in Sanaa, Yemen August 30, 2024. (Source: Reuters/Khaled Abdullah)

On October 7, 2024, we mark the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ successful penetration of Israel’s defenses, its killing of approximately 1,200 Israelis and taking hundreds more hostage. Israel’s subsequent incursion into Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, while the war has spilled into a broader regional conflict.

In this ongoing political and humanitarian crisis, social media has played a key propaganda tool for both sides. It has served as a weapon for authoritarian governments like those of Russia and Iran to attack the West’s perceived failures, while remaining a key method for how people worldwide now follow the conflict. 

The Israel-Hamas war represents a new era where the traditional divides between conventional warfare and online operations have blurred into irrelevance. 

This trend did not start on October 7, 2023.  

Other wars like Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing civil strife engulfing Sudan, and the previous rise of the Islamic State and Iranian proxy forces in the aftermath of the Syrian and Iraq wars have all blended the analog and digital worlds as never before.

Yet the war in the Middle East represents something new.

It came as global platforms like X and those of Meta and Google cut back on their trust and safety oversight — just as Hamas and Israel each took to social media to weaponize the online world for their respective advantage.

It came when the European Union’s new social media rules, known as the Digital Services Act, had just come into force, yet with little enforcement capacity to act.

It came when a new generation of tech companies — most notably TikTok and Telegram — had become the go-to source for many on what was happening in the world.

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab has been tracking the online side of the Israel-Hamas conflict over the last 12 months.

Here are five key takeaways from the last year, and what it means for a war that shows no signs of ending any time soon.

­Hamas and Israel had a social media strategy — and have pulled out all the stops to win online hearts and minds.

On the morning of the attacks on October 7, 2023, for instance, Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades used Telegram channels to announce the beginning of the coordinated attacks against Israel. Affiliated groups, via their separate Telegram channels, jumped on board and from those Telegram messages, often graphic images of the attacks quickly spread onto more mainstream social networks like X, Facebook and Instagram. Palestinian militants used Telegram to share propaganda videos of their attacks against Israeli forces. In specific videos, they added an upside-down red triangle to identify potential targets — a marker that has now become a symbol for pro-Palestinian support.

In response, Israel and its supporters have joined the online fray to push back with their own narratives.

The social media accounts of the Israeli Defense Force, in particular, have actively promoted pro-Israeli accounts of the conflict. On TikTok, Israeli soldiers share videos of themselves destroying buildings and ransacking homes. Others have posted social media content of them handling, and sometimes wearing, Palestinian women’s lingerie. Domestic and international online influencers also have shared positive posts of Tel Aviv’s military pushback against Hamas fighters — including debunked anti-Palestinian rumors and meme-friendly posts of Israeli soldiers.

In the United States, where public opinion, particularly with young voters ahead of the US presidential election, remains split over Washington’s support for Tel Aviv, pro-Israeli groups have stepped in. Over the first three months of the conflict, the likes of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism flooded Facebook and Instagram with pro-Israeli ads to strengthen the perceived wavering of American support.

They outspent pro-Palestinian accounts by a factor of 100 during that time period, based on the DFRLab’s analysis of Meta’s Ad Library, though these paid-for messages in defense of Israel have pulled back in the build-up to November’s election.

Authoritarian governments have weaponized the conflict for their own geopolitical aims.

Iran was among the first to jump on Hamas’s attacks — and Israel’s military response — in its long-running antagonism toward Israel and the US. That included the use of the country’s state-media outlets and their expansive social media followings to push pro-Palestinian narratives and, more importantly, propaganda that accused Tel Aviv and Washington of perpetuating the conflict.

Yet it is Russia that has proven the most agile in using the Middle East war for its own aims.

Moscow has been quick to link Hamas’ attacks with its ongoing invasion of Ukraine — often pushing diametrically opposite claims via its state media outlets and diplomatic social media accounts.

That includes false claims that Kyiv had supplied weapons for the October 7 attack; that NATO had trained the Hamas attackers; and that Western countries’ support for Israel was part of a coordinated anti-Palestinian strategy. Moscow also amplified domestic criticism of Tel Aviv’s attacks on Gaza within the US and European Union to highlight the alleged decline of democratic institutions.

The aim for Russia is not to pick sides in the Hamas-Israeli conflict. Instead, it’s an effort to shift global attention away from Ukraine while using the ongoing war in the Kremlin’s global disinformation campaign to subvert its geopolitical enemies in the West.

Hamas’ attacks on October 7, 2023 coincided with widespread policy and personnel cutbacks within tech companies’ trust and safety teams.

It could not have come at a worse time.

In announcing tens of thousands of collective layoffs within internal teams in charge of handling global emergencies like what happened on October 7, the likes of Meta, X, TikTok, and Alphabet found it difficult to respond in real time to the conflict.

Within days, Meta said it had removed almost 800,000 pieces of content, in both Arabic and Hebrew, that violated the company’s content policies. By January 2024, X said it had “actioned” almost 800,000 posts in line with its separate terms of service related to the war. In the six months through April 6, the latest figures available, TikTok said it had removed 3.1 million videos and suspended more than 140,000 livestreams in Israel and Palestine, collectively, for violating its own community guidelines.

It is hard to gauge if such figures represent the lion’s share of problematic content, or a mere snippet of what remains online.

The DFRLab’s separate review of these platforms indicates that reams of social media posts — promoting hate speech and violence against Israelis and Palestinians, alike — are still readily available, often via generic searches of these platforms for terms linked to the Middle East war.

In February, our analysts discovered a network of inauthentic social media accounts on X that widely shared pro-Israeli content that attacked the United Nations agency that works with Palestinian refugees. A month later, the DFRLab also identified a separate network, spread across Facebook, Instagram and X, that boosted anti-Muslim and Islamophobic narratives targeting people in Canada. In response to that covert network, Meta removed those across from Facebook and Instagram, attributing them to an Israeli digital marketing company. The New York Times subsequently reported that the company in question, Stoic, received approximately $2 million in payment from Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs to conduct the operation. On X, however, many of the inauthentic accounts remain active at the time of writing.

Without greater understanding of how these companies promote potentially divisive content to users worldwide, it is impossible to quantify whether tech companies have adequately responded to the crisis. That would entail mandatory access to public-facing data like Facebook posts and TikTok videos to allow independent researchers to check companies’ assertions about how they have tackled the risk of hateful and violent content on their platforms.

Unlike previous global events, where X played the role of digital ‘town square’ where people gathered to discuss hot-button issues, the Hamas-Israel war springboarded TikTok into untested territory for the social network with ties to China. That was particularly true for TikTok’s younger US users, who shared their opinions about the conflict via viral videos, clipped images of the war and political attacks against those who supported the other side of the war.

This role caught TikTok unaware — and fed into geopolitical tensions swirling around the company in Washington where lawmakers separately passed legislation that forces ByteDance, the platform’s owner, to sell TikTok by early 2025 or face a nationwide ban.

American lawmakers railed against TikTok with allegations that it promoted pro-Palestinian content over pro-Israeli material. In response, the company said its algorithms, which decide which posts were served to users, didn’t take sides in geopolitics. Later, TikTok restricted outsiders’ ability to track the popularity of videos, including those related to the Middle East conflict, after facing such criticism.

Yet this author’s analysis of TikTok data highlighted there was 20 times more pro-Palestinian content produced, over the four months between October 7, 2023 and January 29, 2024, compared to pro-Israeli material. Still, that time period included periods where pro-Palestinian posts were more popular, and other instances when pro-Israeli content garnered more attention.

Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, fears have grown that generative artificial intelligence will be weaponized to promote disinformation on social media.

The Hamas-Israel conflict, so far, dispels those myths.

Despite significant levels of disinformation, graphic footage, propaganda, and hate speech — created and disseminated by both state and non-state actors — there has not been widespread and effective use of artificial intelligence on social media related to the Middle East conflict. The AI-generated content that has garnered relatively limited attention in the ongoing conflict includes pro-Palestinian online memes that portrayed dead children becoming angels and pro-Israeli content that showed Gaza rebuilt as a megacity by Israel.

There are two main reasons for why generative AI has not been a factor.

In the pursuit of spreading their messages online, social media users have preferred to rely on repurposing existing images, footage, and audio clips from other conflicts and, in some instances, from video games. This has proven more cost-effective and convincing than relying on often glitchy AI-generated content that many online can quickly spot as forgeries. The daily deluge of authentic footage from the war, often startling and dramatic, has made it difficult for AI-generated material to gain attention.

The most sophisticated artificial intelligence tools — including those built directly by foreign governments like Russia and Iran — are both expensive and heavily reliant on large datasets. So far, those constraints have proven high barriers for online aggressors to weaponize AI tools in support of either side of the Hamas-Israel conflict.

When confronted with two binary choices — repurpose cheap and hard-to-debunk existing online content or funnel millions of dollars into bespoke AI systems that generate poor-quality material — those on both sides of the war have chosen the path of least resistance over embracing the hype around AI.

The ongoing conflict is an extreme example of the current status quo in how the offline and online worlds now intersect in ways that are opaque, rapid and uncontrollable.

The weaponization of the online environment surrounding the Middle East war — both by the direct combatants, their separate supporters and authoritarian regimes, alike — is an outlier case for what has now become the norm in how politics is conducted worldwide.

There is no longer a division between offline and online. Social media companies remain active participants in how material is shared, even as these platforms have cut back on their trust and safety teams. Adversarial governments have filled the information vacuum to take advantage of new geopolitical conflicts — both foreign and domestic — to erode democratic institutions.

In the Hamas-Israel conflict, these trends are all happening at once. The war currently engulfing the Middle East is likely a canary in the coal mine for how future global conflicts will evolve.

Mark Scott, “Analysis: five online takeaways from the ongoing Mideast conflict,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), October 7, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2024/10/07/analysis-five-online-takeaways-from-the-ongoing-mideast-conflict.